How do you stop "trying"

[worriedmum100]

Hello

Quick background: ttc dc2 for around 16months (lost count!). I'm 37. Ds is 2.2. Follow up appointment at fertility clinic today. All tests clear. I'm ovulating (although cycles vary between 26 and 37 days), internal ultrasound clear, hsg clear. Dp fine. Slightly low count but really good morphology. They wouldn't do amh on nhs but fsh fine. Won't prescribe Clomid as ovulating. Consultant basically said eradicate as much stress as you can from your life, stop temping, stop timing intercourse, stop trying so hard.

My question is how? How do you stop 'trying'? I have a friend who struggled to conceive her second and says she only conceived when she stopped 'trying'. But how do you do it? I'm a control freak! I am trying acupuncture which is going ok. I have a stressful job and very busy life. How do I stop treating ttc as another thing to tick off the 'do to list?

Dp and I are probably going to try not trying until the end of the year and then consider ivf. I'd really like to not try so hard. Any tips greatly appreciated.

Thanks x

I've been ttc number 2 for just over a yr now with no joy. I'm actually still breastfeeding ds 2.0 which is most likely the cause of the infertility so haven't pursued any tests. I've decided the last month or two to stop trying so hard and what will be will be as was getting very stressed by it all. I think 'stopping trying' is a bad choice of words. What you need to do is stop paying so much attention to it all. Carry on Dtd several times each week of your cycle but chuck out the temping etc.
good luck :-)

I think most nhs hospitals will do an AMH and then bill you. I paid £90 for a consultant to take the blood and then a few years later £50 for the pholbotomist to do the same. At a private clinic a fertility MOT could be several hundred pounds but would include AMH. Personally if rather spend my money on this than acupuncture.

Btw your friend didn't conceive because she stopped trying. She conceived because there was always a chance that she would.

Hi OP. My story is similar to yours except that I have been TTC my first. Unexplained sub fertility, tried for just over 2 years then had my first round of IVF not long before my 38th birthday. (It was unsuccessful but I am currently 11 weeks pregnant with a frozen embryo from the first cycle.) I also temped and had acupuncture for most of our second year of trying. And would confess to being a teeny tiny bit of a control freak and a wworrier.

I reckon slapping anyone who tells you "relax and it'll happen" or variations thereof would be a great way to relieve stress :-)

However, I think there is a kernel of sense in it, in that like lozster says, you get pregnant (if you get pregnant) because physically there was always a chance you would. It probably doesn't make much difference to the outcome whether or not you spend the intervening months stressed out of your head, unless it is "life in a war zone" level of stress. But it will make a difference to how your life and relationships are, so it is better for your overall health to let yourself off the hook a bit if you can.

I found it helped to shift my focus slightly. I researched when the probability of conceiving naturally would drop below our probability of a successful outcome through IVF, which in our case was after 2 years of trying. DH and I decided in our own minds, as it seems you have done, to move on to IVF at that point. Knowing our plan B was decided upon helped me be calmer about leaving it to fate in the meantime. Also, rather than focus on "trying" during that period I attempted (not always successfully) to focus on getting healthy, doing yoga for relaxation, spending time with DH doing things we enjoy, etc, so that we would be in the best place we could, physically and mentally, for IVF if we had to use plan B.

I think that it is natural that if you tell yourself not to think about a particular thing, it will be all you think about, so "trying not to try", as it were, will be doomed to failure! But distracting the mind with other things might help.

I had the same experience as lozster with the AMH test, by the way - the NHS hospital gave me the option of sending me to a private clinic for the AMH test, for which I paid £40.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the replies. Interesting about the amh test. The consultant didn't offer me the option to pay. I'll look into that. I'm in two minds. On the one hand I'm hoping doing an am might take some of the panic element away - but only if its not a scary result of course. If it was a scary result I suppose we might consider ivf sooner. I don't know. I find this all so hard to be honest. I think I'm in shock a bit still because we conceived ds so easily.

Dp and I had take away and wine last night which was lovely. I'm going to stop temping and try and relax a bit more.

Ooh, this one annoyed me. Only people who didn't have trouble conceiving (my mum and most of my friends!) said this. I'd have happily relaxed and 'stopped trying' as well, if it had only taken me ten minutes to get pregnant.

DH even started telling me to relax and when, after nearly a year of trying following 3 miscarriages, I pretended to relax (ie didn't talk about it to him) and got pregnant, he felt vindicated! Believe me, I still knew exactly where I was in my cycle!!

Hi redlocks

That's the thing isn't it! Even if I try to relax, stop temping etc, I can't imagine not knowing exactly what cycle day I'm on and just 'taking no notice' of my bloody cervical mucus! :-D

While ?relaxing? isn?t going to get you pregnant, neither does temping and obsessing and stressing get you pregnant either. What will get you pregnant is having sex around three times a week. Honestly, there is no evidence that taking your temperature and wee?ing on a ridiculously expensive piece of plastic increases the likelihood of pregnancy. The only thing those things achieves is to increase your stress levels, and line the pockets of an industry that makes its money by exploiting women who are so desperate to believe it works that they will pay whatever it takes to see that ovulation line or temp spike.

In most other countries the normal conception time is considered to be two years. If your test results have come back normal then there is no reason you are not falling pregnant other than it just hasn?t happened yet. But consider that with the temp charts etc it hasn?t happened you actually have nothing to lose by throwing all that out of the window and just having a normal, healthy sex life with your dh.

Fwiw I ttc a second baby for six years. I never went in for charting etc but I certainly symptom spottedand aimed to have sex around what I would have considered the right time of the month iyswim. After eighteen months I couldn?t keep that up and just resolved that it wasn?t meant to be and that if it was meant to be it would be (we discussed ivf etc and decided it wasn?t for us). I found that it was much less stressful doing it that way and that stressing about it hadn?t actually achieved anything other than making me anxious.

As it happened I never did manage to conceive, but that isn?t really relevant in the scheme of things iyswim.

Maybe do non penetrative stuff for a bit and just enjoy the contact without intent! Hopefully you'll get back into doing stuff for the fun of it and no pressure "full sex" will follow.

(I realise that doesn't negate the knicker checking and cycle tracking but breaks the habit of always having functional sex at specific times so goes a little way to making it a relaxed thing again)

worried, no two ways about it, it is a shit time to go through and generally people don't fully get it unless they've lived it too. The lovely thing about this place is that people do all understand.

You and DP will have days when it's hard and days when it's stressful, which is why these "stop trying so hard" type comments (especially from professionals) make me so mad. There will be days when you just can't "relax and not try", and the last thing you need is the added pressure of feeling (wrongly) that you're causing the fertility problem yourself by not relaxing!

All you can do is be kind to yourself and your relationship by keeping other parts of your life going, and fighting to stop everything in life being about (not) getting pregnant. That includes keeping your sex life for you and DP first and foremost, with the possibility of pregnancy as a bonus rather than the primary motive. This is an attitude of mind, I reckon :-)

I am going to agree with redlocks that if you have tuned into your cycle it is difficult not to be aware, at any particular time, where you are. So I am going to stick up for temping, since for me, I actually liked the feeling that I was tuning into my body after so long on the pill, and it was also reassuring to see that I was ovulating. (On a sadder note, it also saved me a fortune in pregnancy tests as I could see from the temp dip when AF was on the way, which prevented the cruelty of false hopes.) OPKs on the other hand, mess with my head so I stopped using them.

But we are all different and it's about finding the right balance for you.

Even within a relationship, DH and I were different and for him, stepping back a bit from the tyranny of scheduled sex was sanity preserving. So a bit like redlocks, we agreed I'd stop giving him updates on my cycle, but he accepted that as it was my body, I would obviously still know. I don't think there's much you can do about that one, even if you do chuck out the thermometer!

worried when I had an AMH test done I ordered the kit online and took it to my GP's surgery where the nurse took the sample for me. I then sent it off in the post and results came directly back to me. Can't remember exactly how much it cost but under £50.
Like the others have said,I think when you've been ttc for a while you know your body and all the signs so well you can't switch off from it so I wouldn't worry about not being able to do so!
My DH positively didn't want to know any details either about timing ovulation,( he thought it would spoil the romance!), though he knew I was monitoring things. We just dtd regularly(with me doing a bit of extra seducing in the fertile window).
Hope everything works out for you.

After 5 and a bit years ttc DC4 I entirely lost hope. I gave away all my baby stuff. I drew a line under the whole idea of having another child. I began grieving my fertility and attempting to reconcile myself to never having the fourth child I'd always envisaged.

DD3 was born 10 months later. Nothing short of a miracle.

Please dont give up hope i was you a few months back i am 21 in two months so i should be in my 'prime' well i starting trying 6 months after i met my bf, we ttc on my 18th birthday 2 years 7 mobths later i got my first ever bfp (3 weeks ago) i gave up bout a year later stopped countin tempin everything and only now have we concieved i really
wish you all the best and when you do get your bfp you will test 10 times like i did and still not believe it hehe :) x